Friday, 8 April 2011
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
This put me in mind of another company I love: Labour & Wait, who say they "believe in a simple, honest approach to design ... we endeavour to search out specialist makers from around the world, who continue to manufacture goods in the traditional way to their original designs ... therefore appropriate in a traditional or modern environment"
Neither of these companies are massive brands, but they do inspire a fiercely loyal and articulate following. At the heart of what both these brands offer is 'authenticity', an idea which due to straightened times and pressures on people's wallets, has been entering the mainstream for a little while. Need a mainstream example? How about this Budgens supermarket, who grow their own food on their roof and sell it in store every Friday. These brands inhabit a world where the consumer chooses to engage with the history of an item, it's purpose & form, it's relevance to daily life (both theirs and everyone's) and weighs this the value for money equation they are running in the bg.
- clarity - of purpose and message;
- relevance - to present day needs and behaviours;
- continuity - from the original ethos or purpose to the current offer
Friday, 25 February 2011
Monday, 21 February 2011
Friday, 28 January 2011
Thursday, 16 December 2010
“T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.”
Sounds great and makes sense.
This does however leave the door open for a problem to arise. Specifically when a company, wilfully or otherwise, distorts the T-shape and starts to insist either through it’s hiring process, or it’s culture, that the depth of the T should be a design discipline. That a design education somehow denotes a superior breed of design thinkers.
My experiences over the last two years have shown me that large parts of the ‘design toolkit’ I gathered during my design education and on through the first few years of my career no longer satisfy the challenges I am being asked to solve. When tackling increasingly abstract and cultural questions, those tangible skills struggle to find a grounding from which they can start to build a solution.
And I am unconvinced that pure strategy has the answer either (think-tanks anyone?). As that method seems to start in the abstract and stay there – struggling to come out of the clouds except in the form of 'recommendations' – which notoriously hard to design against.
So, imagine if the vertical part of a designers T is strategic thinking.
Making strategy actionable is the most important vertical skill in any T these days and people who can translate between the clouds and the ground are becoming the key member of any design team these days.